


time, its order

by lamphouse



Series: formal experiments [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Aliens, Based on Arrival (2016), Chatting & Messaging, Epistolary, F/F, Fake Science, Gen, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, M/M, Multimedia, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Science Fiction, Unconventional Format, Work Skin Mandatory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:32:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 17,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamphouse/pseuds/lamphouse
Summary: They arrive in May: "they" the vessels, the aliens scattered across the globe, and "they" the seven humans more familiar with each other than strangers should be who are brought together to study one. There's no way to explain either thing, but that's why they're here: to answer questions and question answers.(AnArrival2016 dir. Denis Villeneuve AU)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom & Eddie Kaspbrak, Beverly Marsh & Stanley Uris, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Eventual Beverly Marsh/Kay McCall, Eventual Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, The Losers Club & The Losers Club (IT)
Series: formal experiments [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1420999
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	1. 0.0

**Author's Note:**

> it's not a pressing issue YET, but heads up you will NOT really be able to read this on mobile lol. there's gonna be a fair amount of super cool html css stuff I'm looking forward to, re: the unconventional format tag. it's a story about language, and the ways we tell the stories we have! and also aliens! I'm gonna get real weird with it
> 
> in the meantime, [a song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VS6lH9V25E)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?_  
>  — Ted Chiang, "Story of Your Life"

He's about to ask Eddie a question. It's the most important moment in either of their lives, and Eddie wants to pay attention to every second, every detail, but they both know neither of them have the attention span for that. That's not the point; Eddie still wants to remember as much of this as he can.

They're still in Berkeley, in his house, which became their house, which will become someone else's house. They've just come back, tipsy, from dinner. Eddie wants to look at the moon and he wants to dance, begs Eddie to dance with him, so Eddie waits outside while he messes with the stereo.

Standing on the back porch, Eddie looks up at the trees rather than the moon beyond. In the daylight, sober, he'd be thinking about how they should be trimmed, drooping heavily so close over the roof of the garage. Now, neither of those things, he's thinking about how the thick green tree branches hang over the scrap of grass in a way that makes it feel like a leafy snow globe, bubbled off from the world. 

Eddie is about to turn around at the sound of knocking on the sliding glass door. There he'll see the fogged-over glass, the simple question written there, the antsy eyes behind the smudges, the familiar face behind the cleared lines spelling, "Marry me?"

Eddie says yes—well, Eddie nods, and the door is thrown open too hard, rebounding shut. Eddie's arms are already open when he finally makes it through and they hold each other, swaying slightly with the force. In that way, it's almost like dancing the way he wanted.

They'll get married soon. They won't want to wait too long, gathering their friends in a little park along the bay quickly enough that no one can call the parks department on them.

In a few more years he leaves, back to New Mexico, an old band-aid fix he didn't want in the first place but feels is his only option now. Eddie stays in California for a while after before moving back to the east coast, unable to stay any longer in their house without the them.

He doesn't leave because he stopped loving it there. Loving, the gerund, was never the problem. Eddie was always in the middle of something—to be honest, he isn't sure he believes in beginnings and endings anymore. Time doesn't work the way he thought it did, but if he had to start somewhere, it would probably be the thing that triggered that realization: when they arrived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ITS ARRIVAL TIME BITCHES amy adams was ROOOOBBED and I am still pressed about it 4 years later. more pertinently, I thought about that scene where jeremy renner gets in the alien ship and immediately eats shit. to quote my earlier self: "i just think it would be nice if eddie was brave and took off his hazmat suit and richie named the aliens abbott and costello to make him smile 😔"
> 
> this is going to be a sort of social media-ish au, in that it's a smau but not on twitter and without all the things I hate about smaus. basically what that means here is: multiple epistolary forms interspersed with prose, probably song links and images (tho I'll make sure to have descriptions, that's one of the smau pet peeves lmao), and shorter, more frequent updates. I actually do have a public fandom twitter again (hello 2013 lmao) so hit me up over there @Iamphouse (capital i) and let me know what you think!


	2. 1.1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _(can we rule out the possibility of a link between the myths of "first contact" and "love at first sight"?)_  
>  — Patrick Parrinder, "La Rencontre De L'extraterrestre"
> 
> Job interviews, plant-sitting, and second first meetings. (1.1–1.5)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (remember, work skin necessary!)

Ben H. (Cornell)  
  
**Fri, May 1** 7:15 PM  
Are you watching the news?  
Who am I kidding, of course you are.  
  
Of course I  
  
Exactly  
  
As much good as it's doing  
How many ways are there to say "we have no idea what the fuck's happening and at this point we're just trying not to scream"?  
  
Seeing as that's 80% of life, I'd say a lot.  
  
Fair  
  
You're ok, right?  
  
I'm fine! There was a bit of a scuffle at work, but I was already on my way out.  
  
Today's been quiet, but it always is out here.  
  
"bit of a scuffle"  
  
I get it, I sound like an old man.  
  
You're not going in tomorrow, are you?  
  
I was thinking about it  
  
Has anyone ever told you  
you're a workaholic?  
  
Fuck off, you know you have  
  
I just need something to do  
  
No I get it. I was thinking about doing the same. At least there's a possibility of seeing someone else.  
  
Because you're a workaholic recluse?  
  
Maybe!  
  
Might be good to get out of the city  
in case things get too tense  
  
Are you at the lake? I might join you  
  
Man, how bad must it be for even YOU to think it's too tense.  
Fuck off  
  
Yeah obviously you can come  
  
Ok. I'll probably be up in a couple  
days, gotta get some stuff together  
  
**Yesterday** 1:37 PM  
Prefacing this story by saying yes I  
went to work yes you told me so  
  
Aw Eddie! You know I'd never have to say I told you so. 😊  
  
That little verb preposition in the  
middle there doing a lot of work  
Anyway campus was totally empty  
so I was working on finals shit  
  
Eddie. You can't possibly expect to still hold exams.  
  
No, I was just losing it  
Plus grad students wanting feedback  
  
Again, don't think anyone's thinking about GPs right now, but I understand the need to stay busy.  
  
Right  
Wait stop distracting me  
So I was in my office  
  
All alone...  
  
Ha! That's where you're WRONG  
Ok well I was alone, but then this  
woman showed up? From the army?  
  
Oh shit, about the aliens?  
  
I can't believe that's a real  
sentence you just said but yes  
She showed me... I don't know if I can tell you but it was insane, Ben, it really was  
  
I can feel you geeking out from here.  
Does this mean you're gonna go out there?  
  
I don't know yet  
She's going to Berkeley next to talk to Danvers but I'm pretty sure I took care of that  
  
Eddie, you know I love you, but you also know how that sounds, right?  
  
I didn't kill anyone just...  
killed someone's chance of getting a job  
Hopefully  
  
Also not not ominous.  
  
I'm just saying, I have a good feeling  
  
**Today** 12:04 AM  
Hey Ben?  
  
Hi! What's up?  
  
Something wrong?  
  
No  
But if I left my spare key in the mailbox could you watch my plants for a while  
  
???  
  
Where are you going?  
  
Montana  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so here's how this is gonna work! I think I'm gonna be doing separate chapters for each format, bc otherwise the page gets very busy and idk I don't think it conveys the passage of time v well—this time they all take place within a day of each other, but other updates it might not be so. so! this is 1/5 new chapters today. they'll all be short like this and I'll be posting the next in an hour or so. rip to your inboxes if you have subs on but it's the easiest way! see you then
> 
> oh, and just to clarify, the color and shape of the texts mean nothing! i picked a different blue & am using it throughout so hopefully everyone'll see it as a thematic thing but what phone make model whatever is unimportant to this au, we have bigger things to deal with
> 
> (also welcome to the other timeline! 1.Xs are the main plot, 0.Xs are memories)


	3. 1.2

  
@ B. Marsh  
  


URIS Today at 22:20  
How is recruitment going?

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:45  
pretty well  
driving back up w hanlon  
the choppers landing in kasps backyard and we're all meeting up there

* * *

URIS Today at 23:45  
Good. You're on track to return before the next window.  
Has anyone ever told you your typing is atrocious?

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:45  
you, constantly  
if you didnt want to put up w my texting you shouldnt have given me this sweet ass satphone

* * *

URIS Today at 23:46  
Have you met Tozier yet?

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:46  
no hes already on the chopper im omw to

* * *

URIS Today at 23:46  
Well, know that I'm guarding myself for when you two eventually meet.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:46  
oh? 😈

* * *

URIS Today at 23:46  
Yes, oh.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:47  
well now im stoked  
hows camp looking

* * *

URIS Today at 23:47  
Good. You army people move fast.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:47  
we're known 2

* * *

URIS Today at 23:49  
Tell Hanlon we just started setting up the new centrifuge he recommended.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:49  
he says "wow, so quickly!"  
this man is weirdly polite  
is he one of those secret mad scientist types

* * *

URIS Today at 23:50  
He's an experimental astrobiologist that NASA is on the verge of firing, what do you think?

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:50  
u put me on the nerd bus huh

* * *

URIS Today at 23:51  
You're living an X-File, Beverly, don't be surprised.  
You liked Kaspbrak.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:51  
the first person to call me scully loses a limb  
only bc i respect his machinations & suspect theres a bitch beneath those khakis  
like you!

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:52  
he basically dared me to call back that other guy at berkeley in a weirdly pacifist dick measuring contest + im  
gonna need a drinking buddy if im getting through this thing alive

* * *

URIS Today at 23:52  
Happy for you both.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:53  
to the cia analyst reading this: note tht i am refraining from not using the middle finger emoji

* * *

URIS Today at 23:53  
As the CIA analyst reading this, duly noted.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:53  
we're pulling up at kasps ttyl

* * *

URIS Today at 23:54  
Aaand she's already regressed to abbreviations. Great.

* * *

MARSH Today at 23:54  
😘

* * *


	4. 1.3

Eddie hadn't thought about it when he bought this house five years ago, but the field out back makes a pretty decent landing pad for a helicopter.

If he knew his neighbors he would apologize for waking them up, but he doesn't, so the main thought that occupies his mind as he grabs the bags he packed that afternoon is that it's an odd noise. Eddie's never heard a helicopter this close up and personal—under the high whistle of moving air there's a lower sound than he would have thought of, a _thwomp_ that runs through the house with a Doppler roundness.

Something about the description is lacking, but in his defense Eddie isn't wholly awake right now. Again, recently woken by a helicopter landing in his backyard; he was dozing on the couch in front of the TV again when they arrived, letting variations on a panicked theme lull him to sleep the way only he seems capable of.

It's been a roller coaster forty-some hours: yesterday he woke up tired, grey like the overcast Massachusetts spring, ready to power through his intro syntax lecture before taking a nap in his office; he went to bed just as tired, but no longer because of a bad night's sleep, because in the intervening hours twelve alien crafts had landed across the globe and no one knew how or why, a conclusion he watched the news come to every hour on the hour until his eyes slipped shut.

The next day was just as bad, but their meeting that afternoon left him wired and restless like a tiger pacing its cage. He knew then something was coming. He hadn't foreseen the helicopter in the yard, but at this point? Why not.

"Less," the army commander says as he walks through the kitchen with his bags, on the hunt for his extra laptop charger. "We've got two other sets of luggage to fit, you'll need to pare it down."

"What?"

The headlights of the car she arrived in swing past on their way down the drive and Eddie catches the shape of another walking around his house.

"We need all the help we can get," the commander—Marsh, he remembers—says with a shrug. She's posted up at the island, picking something out on her phone. Her hair glows blue and red in the muted helicopter lights. "Plus we're picking up lab gear and the chopper's only so big."

"Well... Fuck."

She huffs out a laugh, finally meeting his eyes as he swings one of the suitcases up onto the counter and opens the other on the floor. "Don't worry about it if you forget something. Pretty much everyone is gonna be at our beck and call out there, I'm sure someone'll forward you some Sensodyne."

Eddie throws another sweater into the other suitcase. "How do you know I use Sensodyne?"

Marsh gives him a look.

"Okay, point taken."

It's a lot of controlled chaos, but Eddie shuffles around his stuff until he has all his essentials in one case. He shuts off the kitchen light and leaves the other case in the living room, already texting Ben again to ask him to hang the remains back up. Marsh looks impressed as she follows him out, gesturing at someone to take his suitcase before climbing into the dim helicopter interior.

There's only one spot left so he tucks his laptop bag under his seat and straps himself in. Marsh says something unintelligible under the whirling blades and the lights shut off. The interior safety lights glow a muted blue, enough to only enough to make out the faces of those around him and no further. As the helicopter lurches up and away from Eddie's house, he wonders dimly if he remembered to lock the sliding back door. He wonders if that matters anymore.

The man in the corner across from him, only vaguely familiar with the dark, is speaking, though the _thwomp_ -ing drowns it out. Eddie realizes it's to him just as Marsh, facing him, gestures him to the headset hanging next to his head. It clamps awkwardly over his ears and he fiddles with the knob on the side until he hears something other than static.

"Sorry, what was that?"

He smiles, white blue in the dim ambient light of the chopper. "Language is the cornerstone of civilization."

Eddie blinks expectantly. "Yeah?"

"It is the..." Light flashes across his glasses as he glances back down at his book, holding it up to the nearest safety light. "Glue that holds a people together, and it is the first weapon drawn in a conflict."

"I know."

"You wrote that."

"I know." Eddie adjusts his harness straps again, almost self-conscious. "It's a preface, it's wordy bullshit."

"It's good. Wrong, but good."

"What's that supposed to mean?" The familiar brushed-the-wrong-direction, arched-cat's-back reflex makes Eddie lean forward against his harness, as perilous as it makes him feel. He leans forward more when all he gets in response is an absurdly coordinated eyebrow wraggle. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Ignoring this, he points to the man buckled in next to Eddie. "Now you I don't know. I would remember meeting you."

"Mike Hanlon." He leans forward with a warm smile and an outstretched hand. "Astrobiologist, NASA. In Boston for a conference."

"Richie Tozier," he says, shaking Mike's hand. "Berkeley. I don't want any of that honorific bullshit, we're all doctors here."

"Not quite," Marsh adds unperturbed.

"Alright then, I'm Mike."

"How about Mikey?" Richie tries. They're still shaking hands and it makes Eddie itch.

He raises an eyebrow. "I'm an adult."

"Microsoft?"

Mike shrugs handsomely, which Eddie wouldn't have thought was an adverb you could apply to that action but somehow is the only thing that fits. "More of a Linux guy." 

At this Richie cackles, sharp and clear and far too loud in the headset. Eddie winces reflexively at the volume but doesn't really mind it, too distracted by the way the sound lances down his spine and makes him sit up straight in his seat.

"Do you always give people nicknames within seconds of meeting them?"

"Some people enjoy my nicknames, Eds."

Mike squints and tips his head. "Have you two met before?"

Richie's face twitches inscrutably before he quips, "Only in my dreams," and the same time as Eddie says, "That's one way of putting it."

Despite his vehement internal cringing, Eddie still has to suppress a reflexive laugh as Richie sticks his hand out again, this time across Mike to Eddie.

"Richie Tozier," he says again.

"I know." Eddie unclenches one hand from his harness to reach out, but the sway of the helicopter knocks him off course and their hands only brush. Without missing a beat, Richie lurches forward and reels him back in to shake, comically hardy and brief but somehow meaningful underneath it. "Eddie Kaspbrak."

"I know." Richie raises the papers in his other hand and Eddie snorts, his grip relaxing infinitesimally on the polyester straps.

"Sure."

"My man Stan told me you were coming so..." He shrugs. "Thought I'd read up. I also stole a copy of _Lincos_ from the library before I got the hell out of dodge. Gotta figure, if they're gonna speak anything we speak, it'll be that, right?"

At the title, Eddie laughs again, though he's quick to tamp it down. Richie gives him a bright but awkward grin as Marsh says (mostly to Mike), "Richie's joining us from the Los Alamos..."

"Never forget," he adds with, inexplicably, the hang loose gesture.

"...National Laboratory," she finishes unperturbed.

"Just on loan," Richie clarifies. "I hate to support the military industrial complex, but it pays and I get to smash atoms at the Manhattan Project building. They just picked me cuz I was handy, and yes—" He leans towards Mike, sensing Eddie's refusal to put up with his bullshit. "I do mean it that way."

Mike doesn't take the bait. "And your flight just happened to have a layover in Amherst?"

"Got sent on a pitstop to recruit an old buddy at MIT. She—the buddy—has to wrap up some lab shit before coming down, so I hitched a ride with Marshal Marshal over here."

"It's commander, and Marsh," she corrects, but a smirk flickers across her face.

Richie just shrugs as much as he can with the harness. "I told you, I'm a big fan of nicknames."

"Do _you_ know each other?" Eddie asks.

They both shake their heads, though there's an eerie similarity to it that belies the actual answer.

"I read all of your files," Marsh says. "Also he's friends with my CIA contact."

Richie grips his restraints like a kid on a rollercoaster. "Stan the man! He's already up there, right?"

"Yes. You'll all be reporting to both of us: me for on the ground coordination and Uris for 'international relations'. His words, not mine," Bev adds at Eddie's skeptical look. "He's prickly, but he gets the job done. You'll see when we get to the shell."

"The shell?" Mike and Eddie ask at the same time, one delighted and the other just confused.

Richie's head bounces. "That's what they're calling the UFO. Crazy, right?"

"So we'll land at Westover in a few minutes and take the jet to Montana from there," Marsh outlines. "We'll be landing right before visiting hours so you're really getting thrown in the deep end, and then we'll have breakfast and get you all caught up."

"Brunch with aliens," Richie says wondrously, earning a smirk from Mike.

"Our main priority is figuring out what they want and where they're from."

Marsh says it like it's an order (albeit one given through her rather than by her), but judging by the open interest on Richie's face, he obviously thinks it's a conversation. Eddie can already tell this is going to go... great.

"Yeah, yeah, sure." Richie waves dismissively. "But also, like, how did they get here? Are they capable of faster-than-light travel?"

"What are they even made of?" Mike adds, leaning forward excitedly in his seat as Richie turns his full attention on him immediately. "Like, are they breathing our atmosphere or did they bring their own?"

"Oh man, I have—" Richie fumbles at the inner pocket of his jacket before finally pulling out a battered little notebook and a well-used pencil. "Okay, so like, I was thinking we could start with some handshake binary sequences—"

"Or we could just talk to them first," Eddie throws out, just a little petulantly. "Before we start poking and prodding and throwing math problems at them."

When Richie leans forward into the light, Eddie can see that gleam in his eye: the one that means he's about to start prodding. Eddie leans in too, in preparation, but Marsh interrupts with a knowing smirk before they can get into it.

"That's why we have you guys."

The responsibility of it washes over them all, dousing the mood like an early morning high tide taking out the previous night's bonfires. The cabin is silent for the rest of the trip to the airstrip and the same in the plane after, everyone hovering between jumpily overtired and unconscious, headed relentlessly toward the biggest unknown any of them have ever had to contend with.

This is what Eddie is thinking about as they fly ever closer to the thing, the _shell_ in Montana, temple pressed to the vibrating cold of the window. The shell. It's a hole in reality; all things make sense up until that point, a boundary past which the rules do not apply. It frightens him, but more than that it compels him, and that is all the more frightening: to be running towards the edge of the world rather than just falling off it.

He's asleep before they get there.


	5. 1.4

[Image description: A faxed letter on University of California, Davis Division of Statistics letterhead, addressed to Mike Hanlon (care of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC) and dated April 31, 201- (obscured by an imperfection from the copying process). It says:

> _Dear Mike:_  
>  _Here is my report. I hope I didn't get too carried away._  
>  _It is Thursday at 4pm and I have not received Ray's report. Perhaps he expected you to send a copy to me. I am sending him a copy of my report today._  
>  _I look forward to our conference call on Tuesday. I hope you and Andy have time to read this opus work before then!_  
>  _With best wishes,_

and ends with a cut off signature.

End description.]

▲▷▼◁▲

[Image description: A filled out Standard Form 86 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, "Questionnaire for National Security Positions". It is filled out for an Edward Francis Kaspbrak, born November 11, 1975 in Waltham, Massachusetts. Social Security Number beginning 021 redacted.

End description.]

▲▷▼◁▲

[Image description: The first page of the introduction to Dr. Hans Freudenthal's _Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1_ —borrowed by Richie Tozier from one MIT professor—which reads:

> _0 01. Scientists, artists and artisans tend to develop a terminology of their own. They use common language as a vernacular that will be enriched, impoverished. and modified in order to serve special purposes. The transformation may affect not only the vocabulary but also the syntax of the vernacular, though essential syntactical modifications are rather unusual._
> 
> _It is certain, though far from generally admitted, that the meaning of a linguistic term should be determined by its contexts, it is a matter of fact that there cannot be any reasonably uniform opinion about the meaning of a word, if people cannot agree about the truth of the majority of contexts in which the word occurs. It is a common historical feature of many sciences, that their first representatives tried to create a terminology before the stock of known facts was large enough to provide a sufficiently large context for the elements of that terminology. Even now this is a serious drawback for philosophy and the arts. When people do not understand each other, this is usually said to be because ‘they speak different languages’. This may be correct as long as “understanding” means a mere linguistic phenomenon. If understanding means intelligence, one may posit the inverse thesis with at least as much justification: People speak different languages because they do not understand each other. (Note that the word language has here a rather unusual meaning.) _

(Underlines Richie's, in pencil). Richie has also written here "TL;DR - words are hard" in the top right corner and "word..." beside the final underlined sentence.

End description.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mike's page interpolated from the last page of this [cia dot gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R000200070001-9 dot pdf] which I feel vaguely paranoid about linking so you can type it up yourself, eddie's from the legitimate sf86 form you have to fill out to get basically any govt job (can confirm! this is scanned and rewritten from my own lol), richie's from [this pdf](https://monoskop.org/images/8/85/Freudenthal_Hans_Lincos_Design_of_a_Language_for_Cosmic_Intercourse_Part_I.pdf) of _lincos_
> 
> the carnegie institution of science (there were no capital s's on that page and i couldn't match the wonky kerning otherwise lol) really has worked with nasa's astrobiology dept! as mentioned last chapter, mike's kind of the black sheep of the dept so he isn't based in any one office & sort of wanders around, so his mail is sent there. the address is also correct lol
> 
> please appreciate the fax smudges I worked hard on them lol


	6. 1.5

To: ▊▊▊▊@linguist.umass.edu 

Subject: Leave of Absence Effective Immediately

From: kaspbrak@linguist.umass.edu

Pater,  
I assume I'm not the only email like this you're getting, but in my case it's because I'm currently en route to Montana [...]

▲▷▼◁▲

To: ▊▊▊▊▊▊@lanl.gov  
CC: ▊▊▊▊@berkeley.edu, ▊▊▊▊@lbl.gov

Subject: Phoning home

From: richiet@berkeley.edu

Attached:  IMG_23115.jpeg (382 KB) 

To whom it may concern: welp, you should've seen this coming, you're the ones who kept pawning me off on big government! [...]

▲▷▼◁▲

To: ▊▊▊▊▊▊@nasa.gov

Subject: Sorry to interrupt your weekend!

From: michael.hanlon@nasa.gov

Connie,  
Can you forward this to the department heads? I've been approached by the military to begin work on the craft [...]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone's wondering, richie's photo attachment is a selfie taken in the helicopter. I'll be back shortly; my class is wrapping up and I'll be finishing my summer class in a hot minute and I've gots the Focus. seen you soon with another interstitial 0.X chapter.
> 
> angel olsen, play us out! tonight's song is "[citizen of glass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlIRIZSZtuc)"


	7. 0.2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _But just now it is summer again  
>  and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,  
> then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,  
> close, close to one another,  
> Soon now, I’ll turn and start for home.  
> And who knows, maybe I'll be singing._  
> — Mary Oliver, "The Pond"
> 
> Another summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (springsteen) songs in this chapter:  
> \- "[crush on you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDN8pvyKYkU)"  
> \- "[the river](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7BUXRsTbvI)"  
> \- "[sherry darling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCS3mewzWSo)"

Richie's bedroom doesn't have curtains. Well, not anymore. There had been some when Eddie arrived—a truly ugly green, embroidered around the edges, lopsided thanks to an incident Richie is staying mum about but apparently resulted in at least three inches of one side being burnt off—but he'd quickly put his foot down and so now Richie no longer has curtains.

Unfortunately, whatever Eddie's won in common sense and aesthetic sanity he's lost in comfort, as they were capable of one thing besides being an affront to decency and that was covering the window. The window that faces east. Richie's east-facing bedroom window. Right across from the bed like it was precisely calculated to burn retinas every morning. 

Richie doesn't notice, the lucky son of a bitch; he always ends up either facing the other direction or snuggled up to Eddie face-first: cute, but suspicious as hell. Eddie, meanwhile, wakes up every day in Richie's house with a face full of blinding sunshine. It's almost enough to drive him crazy and it usually really does, except he knows that if he wasn't there, getting blinded by Richie's fucking eastern exposure, he wouldn't be there, with Richie, with his striped sheets and bedhead.

Miraculously, though, it's not the light that wakes him this morning but Richie himself, humming something soft and half-familiar. Eddie swims up into consciousness slowly to Richie's chest humming under his hands and the cool weight of the duvet at his feet.

Eyes still shut, Eddie's eyebrows crease and he mumbles, "Wassat."

"Springsteen," Richie says, scratchy with sleep, and kisses his cheek before adding with just a little extra lilt, "Ooh ooh, I've got a crush on you."

"Fucking of course it is."

Eddie rubs his face with both hands before opening his eyes. It's been weeks but it's still a shock to the system to see Richie across from him in bed. If it weren't for the sun, he would forget he's in California at all. Summer is slipping through his fingers like fine beach sand and he knows he has to be back in Massachusetts before the start of the semester—and, in fact, has a ticket for five days—but he can't bring himself to leave; for the first time in his life, Eddie Kaspbrak could run and doesn't want to.

"Good morning, starshine." Richie smiley squints at Eddie before kissing him with closed lips. "The earth says hello."

"Mm, I take it back," he says after accepting another such kiss, "anything's better than that."

"Well, Bruce never wrote about mornings so you get what you get."

"Never?"

"Never ever."

"You have his entire fucking oeuvre memorized?"

"Yep," Richie pops. "Don't know if you noticed, Eds, but your man's a bit of a nerd."

Stifling the reflexive giddiness that jolts through him at the possessive, Eddie nods. "Since the moment I met you."

He smooths his hands back up Richie's chest where they had held on all night, unapologetically fond as he watches Richie's eyes flutter shut at the touch.

"You don't even know the half of it, babe. You met me in my later, attractive years— Trust me, the Boss was my first love and it was thoroughly unrequited. Him and Prince made me the gay I am today."

Eddie wedges his hand under Richie's cheek against the pillows. "Wow, you were a kid in the eighties and you like Prince and Springsteen? Groundbreaking."

"God, you're such a bitch," Richie says with an enormous grin. "Hey, come closer, I can't see you."

"I'm a foot away," Eddie complains, but he's scooching closer anyway, weaving one knee between Richie's. "You're blind as shit."

"Always have been, always will be."

He bumps their foreheads looking for a kiss, but Eddie's mind is back on the previous conversation, picturing Richie at thirteen, Richie as a kid like he's seen in the few photos Richie has, big-toothed and exuberant even frozen in time. The Richie he knows isn't much different, but Eddie still wants to see. He wants to know every Richie he can, to catalog them all an old school naturalist, and chart all their similarities and differences, the variations on the theme that is Richie.

It sounds kind of creepy phrased that way, so Eddie just says, "I wish I'd known you then."

"You really don't," Richie smirks. "I cut the sleeves off half my shirts and my mom refused to buy me new ones, I looked like a stick bug that wished on a monkey's paw to be a real boy."

Realistically, Eddie knows the light in the room is coming from that evil mid-morning sun, but he still thinks part of it comes from Richie. He glows in moments like these, incandescent, lit up from within. God, he's so fucking beautiful. Eddie's in love with him. Really and truly, he can't deny it, he's waist deep and the water keeps rising. He kisses Richie's cheek, his eyebrow, the flat line of his jaw, as he stifles the urge to scream it, self-aware enough to know you can't profess your undying love for someone after a period still best counted in terms of weeks, even weeks like theirs.

Under his ministrations, Richie mumbles, "Stick bug boy does it for you, got it."

"Shut up."

Another kiss, quick to his lips, and Eddie retreats to a safer distance that's just enough to make any kisses embarrassingly and noticeably desperate while still being within Richie's incredibly small range of unaided vision.

"I bet you tried to wear a hat in your pocket like the album art, didn't you? And it didn't work because you were a prepubescent stick bug with no ass to speak of?"

"Why are you bullying me?"

"You've definitely gone to an adult Halloween party like that, I just know it." Eddie rubs his thumb across his smiling cheekbone, with the grain of his morning stubble one way and against the other. "You basic bitch."

Richie cackles. There's no other word for it. "What the fuck?"

"Shut up, it's a word!"

" _I_ know that, how did you?"

"I teach undergrads!" Eddie shouts (nicely) in his face. "You pick things up!"

He laughs harder at that, but then he's rolling away to grab his phone and glasses off the nightstand. "Anyway no, dude, obviously my favorite's _The River_ , I have taste."

"Give me one example of you having taste."

Richie pushes his glasses on one-handed, still doing something on his phone, and then gestures matter-of-factly up and down once at Eddie lying across from him. Eddie kicks his shin, unable to fight back the flush that overwhelms his face, but Richie doesn't say anything, just goes back to scrolling now with Eddie's knee trapped under his own, casual as anything. It's _so_ casual—that's what makes it so insane.

In a few seconds more the phone lands with a thump in the sheets, spitting out a plaintive, vaguely familiar harmonica melody. Now freed, one of Richie's hands lands on Eddie's between them as he hums along immediately, eyes wandering across Eddie's face.

Eddie doesn't know the song—why the fuck would he listen to sad music?—but he likes it solely for the look it brings to Richie's face, calm and a little sad but happy about it. Sometimes Eddie thinks Richie just feels more than him, in general, like he has a wider range of emotions at his disposal. Eddie's feelings are always extremes; he has despondency and blistering optimism with no in-betweens. Richie has all these little variations on themes, like how people think the Starbucks menu works. A little less of this, a little more of that, something secret they don't even publicize, and it's an entirely different drink worth twelve times more. Fixing his collar for him in the bedroom triggers a slightly different awed happiness than it does if Eddie does it in the kitchen. Eddie can't do that. He has no subtlety.

Also, he'll never admit it, not even on pain of death, but Eddie loves Richie's humming even more than his singing. He's so rumbly and palpable, the sound coming from deeper inside him and thus more... Richie, he guesses? Eddie isn't sure of the logic, he just knows that whenever Richie hums Eddie wants to cling to him like ivy while his own ribs disintegrate.

Instead of saying this, Eddie listens to the lyrics for a moment and lets his mouth run on something less revealing. "If you're about to wax poetic Americana I think you should know that I can't be with anyone who unironically says 'working-class struggles'."

"You're a snob, Eds, you know that, right? It's important to me that you know that."

Richie's giving Eddie his handsome face, with the eyebrows and the slightly snide look and the jawline, but Eddie heroically ignores this in favor of throwing up his free hand and saying, "Obviously the struggles of the working class are legitimate! I'm just saying, wearing jeans doesn't make you a champion of the people."

He gasps. "Mean! Mean! Since when are you such a hater, Eds? What did the Boss ever do to you?"

"It's all dignified union workers and the romantic bleakness of working until you die but he's _Bruce Springsteen_ , he's a stadium rock star, he hasn't seen a _dock_ in years." Richie gasps. "Am I wrong? Tell me I'm wrong."

"Incredibly!" Richie fumbles around in the sheets between them and fishes out his phone, mashing the skip button. "It's about the _joy_ , Eddie, it's about being stuck somewhere and finding happiness, babe, like—"

Eventually, the song he wants must come up as Richie's head starts bopping side to side. Eddie recognizes it and the forthcoming bit immediately. He rolls his eyes, but even as he's doing so he's tilting his head up to accept the kiss he also knows is coming.

Thankfully, they're haphazardly swapping spit all through the first chorus, preempting any stupid joke Richie might make and ruin the mood. The mood being, Eddie guesses, making out to Bruce Springsteen, which is deeply middle-aged white men of them, but: a) that's what they are, b) he can't be bothered to care when it's so nice, and perhaps most importantly c) it's keeping Richie from making your mom jokes.

Richie pulls away a few lines before the one Eddie saw coming to kiss along Eddie's jaw, prickly his way across Eddie's skin in a way Eddie always loves. He takes the opportunity to wind his arms around Richie's shoulders, which shift as he props himself up enough to reach Eddie's other cheek.

"I got you and baby, you've got me," he croons against Eddie's jaw when the song gets there. He's a second behind, like reverb, and Eddie's heart liquefies. "Hey, hey, hey, what you say, Eddie, darling?"

"So stupid," Eddie says, shaking his head and pulling him closer.

The saxophone kicks in but is quickly muffled as the phone gets trapped between their bodies, but Richie's already made his point so it's not like it matters. In fact, Richie's the one who shoves the sheets down the bed as they tangle closer together.

Between kisses, Eddie says, "You know there are actual Springsteen songs with my name in them. Like, weirdly a lot."

"Mm." Richie mouths under his jaw, trailing down his neck every few words. "But they're just not romantic enough for how I feel about you, my darling."

"Darling is supposed to be her last name, not a term of endearment," Eddie points out with a shiver when he feels Richie's teeth graze his Adam's apple. "Also since when are you romantic?"

"I'm romantic as hell!" Richie says as he gently pulls aside the collar of Eddie's shirt. It's loose enough already, being not his shirt but one of Richie's, well-worn and always faintly smelling of him. Eddie shivers closer when Richie's chin scratches lightly over his shoulder. "Or have you forgotten how I picked you up at the airport with flowers—"

"The ones you stole from your neighbors' yard that still had dirt on them?"

"Or all those times I've made sweet, tender love to you?"

Eddie wills his eyes not to roll back in his head and says as balefully as he can manage, "Oh, is _that_ what you call it?"

He means it to be the next volley in their regular little snippy repartee/banter/flirting, but instead of lobbing back Richie freezes, lips still against Eddie's clavicle. He realizes what else his question asked at the same time as he realizes Richie that has stopped breathing.

"Oh." His hand flexes against Richie's nape. "Uh."

Richie's forehead tips into Eddie's collar as he shifts so his mouth is over shirt instead of skin. That alone is enough of an answer to make Eddie glad Richie is no longer pressed so close to his heart, which thuds erratically at the realization.

"Maybe," Richie says quietly.

Eddie swallows uselessly, and there's no way Richie misses that, so he convinces himself very quickly to be at least half as brave as Richie was a second ago, hoping that will reassure him.

"Okay. That's... okay." It's not enough, though, because Eddie then feels Richie let out an almost silent and borderline pathetic whine against his shoulder. "No, hey, I mean—"

"No, I got it."

"Richie." Eddie tries to pull Richie's head up to face him, but Richie just burrows closer, shaking his head. He eventually manages to drag Richie up from his shoulder but he's still wrapped up in himself. Trust the linguist to fuck up the simplest admission of the simplest love. "Richie. Please."

At that, Richie's eyes jerk up to meet his. Eddie never says "please" except to service workers and co-workers he'd like to keep. He'd rather die than be polite when he doesn't have to be and the fact that he and Richie have never been _polite_ is something he's always loved about them. The only time he asks for anything nicely is either during sex or under mock duress, usually because Richie is taunting him—but here he is, and it's not really _not_ either of those things, just something more. Vulnerable and teasing and now, also, incredibly serious.

Once he has Richie's full, visual attention, Eddie asks, "Will you say it? For real?"

The look Richie gives him is cautiously skeptical, but Eddie can't give him any more than that. He's not good at this: saying things first, taking that leap. Richie always tells him he's brave and Eddie guesses there are moments where he can see that, but when it comes to Richie he's just too afraid of fucking it up.

But he knows Richie knows this because he used one of those moments of bravery to tell him—and he trusts Richie to meet him on this.

"Eddie," Richie says seriously, slowly, watching Eddie's reaction, "I think about making love to you all the time."

Eddie jerks backward with a punch to Richie's shoulder, poorly stifling laughter as he goes. Okay, yes, he should have also trusted Richie to fuck with him just a little, because that's kind of their love language and holy _fuck_ that's their _love_ language, Richie _loves_ him.

"You piece of shit, God, I can't fucking stand you."

To his credit, Richie leans back so as not to laugh _directly_ in Eddie's face, but he doesn't go anywhere. Eddie punches him lightly again to make sure and when it just knocks loose one last giggle, he tugs Richie's face into place to stare at after dropping a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth.

He looks like Richie: messy hair, lopsided glasses, chip in his front tooth from a high school dare he retells with relish. There's a crease across his right cheek where it had been pressed to his pillow, facing Eddie all night, and he's flushed with attention and the warmth of the sheets, making his eyes stand out. Eddie keeps being drawn to those eyes: the usual mirth at getting one over on Eddie, the nervousness lurking beneath, the way he keeps closing them like he's afraid to look at Eddie but afraid to look like he isn't looking even more.

"Richie." Eddie presses his thumbs into Richie's cheeks to keep his focus. "Say it so I can say it back."

Richie's hand sneaks up to thumb at Eddie's cheek so gently Eddie feels it more through the fine hair there than the nerves in his skin. "I love you."

"I love you too."

Vulnerable disbelief flickers across Richie's face before it's replaced by a well-meaning attempt at a smirk as he wobbles out, "Now who's the one with questionable taste?"

"Still you," Eddie spits out. "What are— You've gotta be fucking kidding me. Of course I love you, look at you."

Were he any closer, Eddie thinks he would genuinely be able to feel the heat coming off of Richie's face. His face is awkward and splotchy and so beautiful and Eddie wants to kiss him senseless as he throws his hand in the air and says, "Why is this the most fucking combative declaration of love ever! You're such a little shit, oh my god, no wonder I love you."

"Yeah?" Eddie kicks his foot lightly. "Fuck you, dude, you're lucky to have me."

"I know I am!"

Eddie kicks him again, a little harder. "And I'm lucky to have you."

"Ugh!" Richie groans into his hands and rolls over, away from Eddie's "big ol' eyes" as he calls them. "Stop trying to kill me."

The last thing he wants to be doing right now is looking at the back of Richie's head (although it is nice and Eddie loves it because, again, he loves Richie, cannot stress this enough), but Richie just rolls away further when Eddie yanks on his arm. He goes too far, though, and ends up face to face with Eddie anyway—accidentally, it seems, judging by the surprise on his face.

"Richie. Of course I am." Eddie's face twists with both admonition and admiration. His glasses are smeared and in a second Eddie's gonna clean them for him just to prove it. "You're Richie, you're my man, you're..." He trails off and his expression softens. "You're everything."

Richie's eyes are so big it's a miracle they haven't already popped out of his head (which Eddie's brain then runs with in a literal way that's gross mostly because his next thought is that he'd push them back in for him, romantically, like they're the Addamses or in a Tim Burton movie or something) but something of his usual teasing casualness returns.

"I'm your man," he echoes.

Eddie rolls his eyes. "Yeah, I know. S'true though."

Grinning, Richie shuffles around to free his arm from underneath him. He still doesn't turn over, his neck at a weird angle that's gonna hurt soon, but he fixes his glasses with one hand across the frames, which definitely doesn't make Eddie want to bite his palm but nevertheless scatters all other thoughts from his head. "I knew you noticed that."

"No shit I noticed, I'm obsessed with you. I notice everything you do." When his own words catch up to him, Eddie blushes more. "Also you were literally talking to me a foot from my face, of course I heard it. Idiot."

Before he can reply, Eddie shoves himself up into sitting and steals Richie's glasses, conveniently and excusably blinding him. As he takes them he briefly catches Richie's hand, still hanging between them, and presses a quick kiss to the center of it.

Richie turns again, back to where he started, and squints up at Eddie in the morning light. Eddie tries not to look at him while he cleans the glasses, knowing if he does he'll lose what little semblance of control he has right now. It's hard enough to focus when Richie is cautiously and then confidently inching closer, tucking one long leg between Eddie's, wrapping his arms around Eddie's waist, setting his chin on Eddie's hip. It's hard enough with all that going on. He doesn't need to see Richie's wide eyes and knowing smile.

"Hey Eddie?" He digs his chin in in a bid for Eddie's attention. "Baby?"

"What?" Man, these glasses are really dirty.

"Gonna let your man show you how much of a man he is?"

"That's terrible," Eddie says, definitely not laughing anyway, no.

"How bout you, then?" Richie finds a gap between Eddie's shirt and boxers, a gap he widens with his mouth and one hand sliding up under the hem. His other arm is still holding Eddie's back, the smallest pressure over his hips. "Can I appreciate how much of a man my man is?"

"Seriously, _such_ an awful line." Eddie slides down in his grip. He feels it when Richie breaks into a smile and again when his teeth go from grin to gentle nip, though they're not totally distinct.

From under his shirt, Eddie hears, "You love it."

"I do." He leans over Richie to set his glasses on his nightstand for him. "Also, I'm only gonna say this once, so listen closely, but: you were right."

Richie's head pops up, hair in disarray and grin fluorescent. "I was?"

"Mm." He smooths down Richie's hair before letting his grin grow smarmy. "You really are just _constantly_ thinking about fucking me."

Richie rears back with a laugh before launching forward with even more velocity to bury his face in Eddie's shirt. "Only you, sweetheart. Only you."

Eddie chuckles and messes Richie's hair up back the way it was. The feeling rears back up in his chest and he feels like he's swimming in it, floating in it, bright yellow light like the ocean before the sun sets. Love. He loves Richie, wrapped around him like a limpet and gently biting Eddie's shirt. It's a big, gold feeling that spills back and forth into every day Eddie ever lived and every day ahead of him—of them.

"In my defense," Richie continues into Eddie's shirt, "I actually do think about making love to you all the time—and yeah, because it's so good, but also kinda because it's just another way of thinking about how I'm in love with you."

"...Fuck."

Richie's face appears again. "Too much?"

"No, just—" Eddie contorts himself over to kiss the top of Richie's head, which smells like the plainest of shampoos and, for some reason, Febreze. Actually, everything smells like Febreze, now that he thinks about it—does Richie Febreze his sheets instead of washing them? Goddammit, it had to be him, huh... "That was really sweet, Richie, thank you."

Richie squeezes his eyes shut and digs his chin into Eddie's side. "Don't _thank_ me, Jesus. It's just true."

Folded almost in half over Richie, Eddie kisses his head again, arms splayed over Richie's back. He knows the face he's making right now is one of blatant and probably sickening adoration, but he can't help it, he just... Eddie adores him. Sure, Richie's a piece of shit sometimes and he's crude and obnoxious and for someone so smart he can be so dumb, but Eddie looks at him and it's like he's standing in front of the sun, outlined in a warm glow like an angel or something. There is very little Eddie would not forgive him, not even Febrezing his sheets when he should obviously just wash them like an adult.

God, he really does love Richie, doesn't he? In a kind of storybook, eternal flame kind of way. All-encompassing and endless. What the fuck is Eddie, a real-life person, supposed to do with that? How does fucking bona fide soulmate love mesh with bi-coastal teaching schedules and incompatible bad habits? And now he's trying not to cry into Richie's hair.

"Shit, I'm gonna miss you." He doesn't mean to say it and as is he barely does, mostly whispering in a gut-punched way, but Richie lurches underneath him until Eddie is forced to resurface.

"Eddie—" He's cut off immediately by Eddie's torrent of nerves.

"I mean, in a few days I have to go back to Amherst for the semester, and even if I see you at fall break, we'll both be busy all semester—"

"I know," Richie says.

"And I have the spring off but that's for the book tour," Eddie continues, "and all my West Coast stops are in January, so it's really until summer, and that's a whole year—"

"It's not like we won't talk," Richie tries again.

"And what if you—"

This time Eddie is the one to cut himself off, because the end of that sentence is hypothetically, _what if you don't love me anymore, what if you realize you don't really love me_ , something that makes a spontaneous confession of love mere weeks into a relationship seem perfectly sane.

Richie's hands reach first, falteringly, for Eddie's cheeks, then his biceps, not holding him still but just... holding him. Warm hands and deranged bedhead. "Eddie."

"I just want—" Unwilling to shake Richie off and so unable to lift his arms that high, Eddie's hands land on Richie's knees, skin to skin. "I just want to have dumb arguments about Springsteen with you, I don't want to think about reality anymore."

Would that the ground would swallow Eddie whole. Would that he could sink into the sheets, the mattress, the bed frame, the floorboards, down to the first floor and the foundations and the warm, welcoming soil of Mother Earth's non-judgmental bosom just by thinking himself heavy.

None of that happens, of course, and Eddie screws his eyes shut. He knows Richie's going to break the silence after only a few seconds and he's going to have to deal with this, which he wants to do if only so he can get to everything that lies on the other side of the conversation.

Almost on cue, Richie says, "Eds." He's always saying that. "Eddie." That too.

Eddie still can't look at him, squirrelly glancing around the room, can't accept the reality of the situation and Richie's own feelings, whatever they may be, that he couldn't know in his own imagination, but one of Richie's hands reaches up to his cheek and Eddie looks up.

"Richie."

Richie's smile is almost pitying until Eddie notices the heavy shine in his eyes. There are the feelings he was worried about, and they're just Richie, just a little sad and very happy and not-so-secretly overwrought and deep-seated emotional the way everything with him is at its heart. His hand slips back to cover the nape of Eddie's neck, the flat weight of his palm like an anchor.

"We don't have to think it all through right now—" Richie cuts himself off with a weird little laugh. "I mean, we haven't even had breakfast yet, dude. But I love you and I really want to make this work so... whatever it takes, y'know? We'll be okay."

Eddie and all adjacent worries melt under Richie's hands. Yes, it's weak so far as reassurances go and should not work on Eddie Kaspbrak, career worrier, but simply by trying to make Eddie feel better, Richie does. Suddenly Eddie doesn't mind the light so much; without it, this might feel less real, ill-defined and hazy like a dream. Here and now there's no escaping the reality of the moment, with all its detail and imperfections.

"Okay." Eddie nods and goes in for a kiss, but Richie stops him for a second.

"And I love you," he says with his eyebrows as well as his words.

"Yeah. I got it." Eddie tugs at his shoulder, not even trying to hide his burgeoning smile. "You gonna kiss me or what?"

He leans in again but Richie ducks and Eddie's lips land on his cheek. "I just wanted to make sure you know!"

"I know." Eddie's smile is goofy and sharp. "Come on, you haven't kissed me since you told me you love me, hurry up."

Richie is already leaning in as he speaks, their foreheads bouncing off each other before their smiling mouths finally meet. It's a good kiss, suffuse with the longing that comes of an expiration date and yet not dampened by that, and Eddie commits it all to memory: the rumpled peaks of the sheets around them, the smooth feeling of the back of Richie's teeth, the bright melon colors of the sun through his eyelids, yellow and pink.

Between kisses, Eddie says, "Richie."

"Yeah?" Richie says directly against Eddie's mouth, their lips catching against each other.

"I know I leave in less than a week," he gets out in an only barely longer pause, "but you have to buy curtains, Rich, seriously."

Richie fully cackles, rearing back until he's nearly horizontal on the bed, voice filling the stillness of the Tuesday morning air. Though Eddie shoves at Richie's shoulders until he's flat against the sheets before then shoving his face into them, he's laughing too, closed mouth snorts that he quickly loses control of. The sound is sweet and full, like honey.

"I will buy you reams of drapery, my love," Richie says, launching himself up. He wraps his arms around Eddie's waist, holding him tight and rocking them back and forth slightly. "Miles and miles of crushed velvet. Only the finest for you."

Eddie drops the subject in favor of taking the time he has in the same room with Richie. Sure, he'll send Richie fourteen emails with a single Ikea link each from the departure lounge five mornings from now because they'll have both forgotten for the same reason Eddie's letting it go now. Summer is over, but summer isn't the end. They have time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please note that the author is wearing a shirt that says "I have a complicated relationship with the authenticity of bruce springsteen's reputation as a working class hero but 'hungry heart' slaps"
> 
> [but also I am SO PISSED I blew like my whole springsteen quota on this one chapter, they're not even the best on the album! (it's hungry heart and ties that bind, which is such an it song it drives me crazy that the epigraphs are limited to born in the usa, it's batshit.) one day I'm gonna write a dumb thing set to rosalita & the debt will be paid]
> 
> anyway, this is long, but I really wanted to establish their relationship and let y'all linger in it before I yoink you back into the plot where they are not together. this is because. I am a sadist. thank u.
> 
> [come hang out on twitter!](https://twitter.com/Iamphouse) I qrt social media aus and post stupid wip snippets and post [bizarrely specific memes](https://twitter.com/Iamphouse/status/1294706709429194752)


	8. 1.6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the_ size _of that imagined leviathan._  
>  — Jeff VanderMeer, _Annihilation_
> 
> Close encounters, impossible physics, and drama of both a literary and interpersonal kind. (1.6–1.12)

They land in Montana in the early morning. By the time they make it to the second helicopter that will take them to the site they can already see a hint of over the hills, Eddie finds himself already accustomed to the rumble of the engine echoing around him, the beating of the propellers, the security of the harness.

In the minutes before they land, Eddie tries not to look out the window, though he catches the monumental shadow from the corner of his eye occasionally. Richie and Mike have no such qualms, pressed up against their respective windows as soon as the helicopter is high enough and trading theories about the shape and materials, how it got there, what it could be about this specific valley. Eddie's pretty sure he hears Mike say "ley lines" at one point but he's trying not to listen and instead focus on the white noise thrum of the helicopter, like attuning himself to its vibrations will in some way realign his atoms into a person who can actually do this.

He can't avoid it for long, though, and as they land at the camp a mile away it's all he can see: huge, deeply dark blue, curved like a bar of soap. This close he can see the thin gap of air between the shell and the grass below, both completely still. Fog is beginning to spill into the valley on the barest of breezes, spun out into nothing under the helicopter's blades, but the shell remains eerily serene where it hovers above the Earth's surface, silent and still like it takes nothing to keep it in the air.

When they climb out from under the slowing blades, an alarm sounds once from within the compound, making Commander Marsh swear under her breath. Eddie almost misses it, too busy taking in every sensory detail he can—the smell of cold, wet grass that means morning, the trucks rumbling around, what he thinks is someone being carried away in a gurney with a plastic bubble over it—but then she repeats herself just louder enough to hear.

"I really thought we'd have more time," she says, almost to herself. "Alright, uh, you guys can leave your bags in here, we'll come back for them. That's the fifteen minute warning, though, so we'll have to go right in—get you acquainted with our friends upstairs now rather than—" She checks her watch. "Wait 'til 1900 hours. It'll be a surprise! Think of it that way."

She's disturbingly chipper for someone who's supposedly spent a day and then some traversing Massachusetts before sleeping five hours on a plane (a generous estimate, considering she was awake and on her laptop when Eddie fell asleep and when he woke up). It's unnerving until Eddie catches the manic twitch in her eye that says she doesn't have it as together as she seems. He finds that reassuring; he's never trusted peppy people who have their shit together. It's unnatural.

Marsh sets off without another word and the three of them follow in her wake like disoriented ducklings, though Eddie gets the sense she's walking much slower than she'd like to for their sakes. It's just past dawn, long enough that the natural color of the landscape has returned but not so late that there's a pink tint over everything. The grass under their feet is wet the same way the hills around them are, dew and mist adding a natural cooling feeling to the eerie chill Eddie gets whenever he sees the ship.

Its presence weighs heavy in his mind the way gravity reminds your body its standing in front of a drop or at the top of a steep hill, the heavy threat of a sharper tug that will send you careening over. As they walk through the camp his eye keeps drifting to it as if expecting it to have moved. Maybe it's just their angle on it, but the smooth shape looks just this side of asymmetrical so that whenever he looks up it's just different enough to set Eddie's brain on alert, _something is not right_ , making him stumble once or twice as they dodge personnel going about their business.

Richie catches one such stumble and glances at Eddie before mumbling as if to himself, "Sears Tower's taller."

Eddie shoots him a look. Richie raises his eyebrows defensively.

"What? I looked it up, it's like a 200 foot difference."

"The Sears Tower didn't come from outer space," Eddie snaps back.

Richie makes some baffled, semi-offended expression quickly lost as they follow Commander Marsh's wake as she leads them through the trailers and bigger, barracks-looking tents.

They're dotted with more satellites than Eddie has seen anywhere since 2004, all of which are pointed at the—

Well, he better get used to calling it a "shell," if that's the term they're so dead set on using. It brings up all sorts of associations that become more and more unsettling the longer he thinks about it here. Shell like an egg, contained; like a turtle, smaller pieces fused together; like a syllable, the first and last segments together; like a mollusk, winding inward; like a person, hollow; like an atom, tiny pieces connected to each other across space. Thinking about any of those things in conjunction with the shape before him makes it all suddenly ominous—or maybe intriguing is the word. Eddie can't tell if that's better or worse.

Halfway between the helicopter and the nearest building, a man in a plaid shirt and wire-rimmed glasses comes up to meet them. He stops when Marsh does, waving around a folder as he says, "Holyhead's reporting similar barometric readings to the others. No change until they're kicked out."

Marsh takes the folder she hands him, though she doesn't open it any longer than it takes to read the title and first few lines.

"We're trying to find a way to keep the oxygen sensor in the chamber after the session ends without disruption," he continues before noticing the others. "Oh. Hi."

"This is Bill Denbrough, one of our..." Marsh trails off conspicuously. "Well, an analyst. You can meet him when we get back, we're on a bit of a time limit and you three still have to check in at medical." Her eyes wander to the file Denbrough had handed her. "Bill, can you...?"

He nods. "Sure."

"Oh, and can you—" Marsh, already slowly walking backward, waves unintelligibly without looking up.

"I'll tell Kay you said hi," Denbrough finishes for her before catching the other three's eyes. "Thuh-this way, guys."

They're gone barely three steps before Richie blurts, "What was that about barometrics?"

"The shell..." He glances back at them. "I don't know how m-much you all know, but the shell only opens for about forty minutes every thirteen hours."

"Forty-six minutes," Mike says. When he catches Eddie and Richie's confused looks, he adds, "It was in the dossier they gave us on the plane. Did you not read it?"

"I slept," Eddie says.

Richie shrugs. "Must've sat on it."

"B-b-bodes well," Denbrough quips. "Anyway, yes. After forty-six minutes, gravity shifts in the r-room, sliding everything out before it seals shut for thirteen hours. We just can't figure out why."

"So, the barometers?" Richie prompts.

"Well, we know air in the room doesn't circulate, so after an hour or so we'd run out of oxygen, but we don't have any d-data after because..."

"Gravity slides the sensors out," Mike finishes, to Denbrough's grateful nod. "Why thirteen hours? It wouldn't take that long to refill the room."

Richie jumps in. "If their atmosphere is different from Earth's, it could take them longer to re-balance the O2 content and pressure for us."

"But why does it change back, if it opens to our open air? If the atmosphere is fine while we're in there, why would it not be fine after?" Mike stops in place with a look of pure curiosity. "Do they come into the room?"

Eddie, who has been lost for this entire conversation and more than a little frustrated with it, stares at him in horror. "What?"

Denbrough grimaces. "Ah."

"What?!"

"I don't know h-how much I'm supposed to tell you before you go in," he says slowly. "We're not really supposed to... cloud observations."

"That's insane." Eddie knows he's snapping at the wrong person, but he's the right person in the moment. "If I'm about to go stand in a room with some aliens that could lock me in a room where they can slowly suffocate me, you have to tell me."

"Listen, I—" The door of the building next to them swings open, letting out a stream of walkie-talkie noise. "There's not really time. I g-guess I, I just. Need you to trust me. Right now."

It's a bizarre thing to say to a stranger you've just met, let alone a bizarre thing to _believe_ from such a stranger, but Eddie does. Amidst all the disorientation of the past forty-eight hours, Denbrough seems fixed and anchoring; something about him is almost exceptionally unassuming, his plaid shirt and gently worn brown shoes comfortingly normal in the face of alien invasions. Inspiringly human.

"Look, can we—?" He jerks his head back in the direction they were headed before. "If I don't deliver you to Dr. McCall, Bev'll have my head, but I w-wanted to take you through the main science tent."

Mike nods first with only a moment's pause and, after a glance at Eddie, Richie shrugs too. It's only after a nod from Eddie, though, that Denbrough continues, as though he wouldn't have without their full agreement. That thought touches Eddie, just a bit, just enough that the ripples build and break on the shores of Eddie's trust before they reach their destination.

Denbrough stops the three of them just outside the tent, out of the way of the door.

"A few things before we go in," he says. "The f-first is that I'm gonna need your phones. Just for now—" Eddie had opened his mouth to object but shuts it to hear out the explanation. "Just while we're up there. Something about the shell interferes with cell signals in a mile radius, which is why the camp's this far aw-wuh— out. Later we'll get your sat phones and you can just leave these in your quarters, but..."

Eddie slaps the phone into his open palm, feeling like he's handing over his life to Denbrough—Bill, he guess—and not really caring. He says things and Eddie sees them, clear as day, perfectly reasonable, and agrees. "Deal."

The other two follow suit and Bill tucks them all in his leather bag. In return, he hands them each a lanyard "to wear at all times" before glancing at his silver calculator watch. "Okay."

With that, he leads them into the tent. Eddie finds himself blinking repeatedly at the darkness inside, the orange light coloring the synthetic canvas walls in stark contrast with the cool blue morning. The light grows cooler as the hall turns into the main area, the military types that they saw outside slowly replaced with nerdy types with lanyards and folders like Bill's.

Finally the hallway curves into a room dominated by screens, rows of computers and a wall of monitors all full of talking heads. A multiplicity of languages fills the room, many coming from that front wall, where each head is labeled. Hokkaido, Wales, Sierra Leone, Kimberley, Siberia, Maracay, Shanghai, Kujalleq, Punjab, Black Sea, Khartoum: the eleven other sites where they landed.

"This is the ops tent," Bill says. He doesn't break his stride as he takes them through the room, pointing offhand to another doorway as he adds, "Conference room. Y-you guys will mostly be in huh-here, though."

"Here" is a wide open area littered with scribbled on whiteboards, recessed lighting, and people with highlighters. If it weren't for the way the walls ripple when a truck drives past or the wind shifts, it would look like any university computer lab on the planet. A few heads pop up as they enter, but the alarm sounds again, twice now, and Bill winces.

"That's ten minutes," he says. "Okay, this is the main science tent. There are other l-l-labs and— Yeah. We'll be back."

With one last glance around, he leads them quickly through the back door. Eddie manages to spot a string of Latin affixes on one board, mish-mashed taxonomic classes—he catches "hept" in one corner and is left to wonder what the fuck that could mean as the compound spits them back out onto the grass. It's just a few short steps to the medical tent, it seems, though Eddie has no idea where they are anymore in relation to anything but the shell, which looms in his consciousness even though he hasn't seen it since they got inside.

When Bill's harried steps finally stop, it's at a doorway where a woman in a lab coat leans, smoking. "Took you long enough."

"Sorry," Bill says. "Took the long way. Bev says hi."

He adds the last part as if he just remembered it, making McCall roll her eyes, but she stubs out her cigarette on the side of the tent and straightens anyway. "Get in, then."

It looks like how Eddie would assume an army hospital tent would: empty beds in rows along each wall, nondescript equipment along the back, a doorway to their right that Eddie can see leads to an office and another toward the back he can only assume leads to some kind of operating room or something. There are no patients with bizarre injuries like he had worried, no one babbling to themself about the mind-melting effects of meeting alien life, no one in comas. It's normal the way Bill is normal: comforting compared to a world turned upside down.

Dr. McCall picks up a stack of clipboards from the desk in the other room and returns. She doesn't try to shake any of their hands, just correctly names them as she makes eye contact with each and gets down to business.

"When was the last time any of you ate?" Every one of them answers the night before and Dr. McCall scribbles something perfunctory on each of the clipboards. "Last time you did something stressful?"

"Does now count?" Richie asks. It has the look of a joke but falls flat with reality.

She levels him with a look, though Eddie catches a flicker of a smile in her eyes. "We're gonna do a baseline blood draw and give you an immunization cocktail that should cover a battery of bacterial threats."

"Is there any evidence for that?" Eddie dropped out of pre-med the second they got to immunology. "I mean, have there been any signs of anything, is there any concrete reason to?"

"It's a precaution," Dr. McCall non-answers as one of the nurses makes his way around, drawing blood from each of them. "Just a couple extra questions. Are any of you claustrophobic?"

They all shake their heads no, Richie's turning into a flinch midway through as he gets stuck with his needle first.

"Pregnant?"

The same answer and it's Mike's turn. They're just drawing blood but Eddie watches closely anyway. It's not paranoia if it could really happen, and Eddie needs to know that whatever he's going to see will be real, unaltered by whatever sedative they might try to slip him. He's worked hard to overcome his plethora of medicinal issues, but if there's any time to be cautious and skeptical, it's now.

There's just something unnerving about the casual ease with which McCall runs through the checkboxes, posted up on a bed opposite them with one foot swinging. He thinks of the person in the gurney, hand hanging limply off the side, encased in plastic.

Mike, holding a square of gauze to his elbow, seems to feel the same since he asks, "Who was that we saw getting carted off in the medevac?"

McCall's head twitches up no higher than their shoes and she clicks her pen a couple times. "Not everyone is able to process experiences like this," she says, a little terse. "Our brains aren't really wired for what you're about to do."

The nurse makes it to Eddie before he can follow up, a prick that reminds him of a million things, the sharp intrusion of reality. That single prod has in it a hundred memories of days languishing in bed over something nonexistent and being ferried back and forth to hospitals with no answers.

"Are any of you currently taking any medications not in your latest paperwork? Any allergies?" Before Eddie can say anything, McCall adds, "Don't worry, Kaspbrak, we've got your file."

He wants to tell her to ignore all of it, to chuck it in a fire so he can stomp on the ashes, but he doesn't really want to bring it up in front of the others and open that whole can of worms, so he just jerks his head in a nod that looks more like a twitch, ignoring the feeling of Richie's eyes on him.

The same nurse makes even quicker work of their shots until they all have bandages taped to the inside of both elbows. Eddie tries not to think about the organisms swimming their way through his blood now; there are a million things to worry about right now and yet it's the idea of contracting meningitis here and now, of all places, that has his mind racing and throat tightening.

After that, it's a bit of a blur. The familiar anxiety that comes with any hospital talk spills into the persistent _what next, what next, what next_ dread that's been filling Eddie's body since they landed, flooding his skull until his brain feels loose and floating, like a cartoon brain in a jar, swirling uselessly whenever he turns his head. He signs something, he's sure, and he remembers watching Bill hand his leather bag to McCall for safekeeping because he suddenly wonders if he remembered to turn the ringer off—because even with everything he's still worried about being polite, Jesus Christ.

Bill leads them through an air lock where people in white cleanroom suits dress them, efficiently zipping on vests and packs while the four of them just lift their arms. There are little skull caps to keep their hair down under miked helmets and SCBA packs, all encased in a big orange hazmat suit that dulls every touch and sight into something clumsy and blurry, like pins and needles in every limb.

"Have you ever been scuba diving before?" Bill asks as they're getting zipped up.

Eddie just looks at him balefully, resisting the urge to kick Richie for the snicker he hears (thanks to the headsets) the other man try to muffle. He's not a child, so he just shakes his head and Bill shrugs.

"It's k-kinda like that."

No one says anything more, though, as an anticipatory sobriety falls over them. Outside a truck weights for them with a hastily constructed bench in the bed. Two other orange figures are already there, one Eddie recognizes as Commander Marsh when she turns to wave, her other hand on the equipment case in her lap.

As they approach, she asks, "Ready?"

Bill is the only one who answers, nodding while Mike and Richie climb up. In all honesty, Eddie doesn't know what he would say anyway, but it doesn't matter as the truck starts the moment he's settled, the other figure tapping the roof of the cab and setting them off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not to sound like your stereotypical fic writer downplaying personal crises in apologetic a/n's but:  
> hey gang, sorry, I meant to update a couple days ago but got sidetracked by rupturing my ear drum!
> 
> dfjgkl inb4: I'm fine, I just blew my nose too hard, the human body is a fragile, beautiful horror show. lots of updates today, though! pretty prose heavy; you'll now see why this is not a traditional smau lmao (answer: I am a Wordy Bitch). here we go!


	9. 1.7

SHELL SPECS MEASUREMENTS AND MODEL

**Document Number** : CIA-RPL97-▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊-78

**Collection** : SHELL

**Document Release Date** : 10.03.20▊▊

**File** :  [shellmodel.png (86.2 KB)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1f5382b940e17c04757d55ca18cbd9b1/tumblr_inline_qg5ktbrTyf1rqako5_1280.jpg) shellmodeldata.pdf (259 KB)

Face refers to convex side facing camp. Approximately 1500 feet (258 meters) tall and 750 feet (229 meters) across, hovering approximately 20 feet (6.1 meters) above the ground, consistent with other sites. Measurements taken from ground, symmetry confirmed by helicopter flybys. Made of a dark grey unknown material, lightly pitted surface.

[Image description: A black egg shape shown in six orientations: "VERTICAL PROFILE," "FACE," "REVERSE," "3/4 FACE," 3/4 REVERSE" and "TOP OR BOTTOM." In the profile and top or bottom views it is apparent that the shape is not completely symmetrical and the reverse is concave to the face's convex. The 3/4 views support this. Otherwise it is symmetrical (face, reverse view). As it is only a model, it is a smooth, artificial black rather than the pitted surface described above. End Description.]

▲▷▼◁▲

SHELL EXTERIOR DAYLIGHT

**Document Number** : CIA-RPL97-▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊-23

**Collection** : SHELL

**Document Release Date** : 10.02.20▊▊

**File** :  [extbottom0572.png (1.19 MB)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c1a523a08b202f35e8149b7d742e0c67/tumblr_inline_qg5kuaou371rqako5_1280.png)

Researchers and detail (Drs. Ripsom and Corcoran, Sgt. Criss, Prv. Huggins) approach the shell before session 2. Note: quality of photo degraded slightly due to shell proximity.

[Image description: People in either orange hazmat suits or green protective gear standing below the shell with a hydraulic lift, preparing to enter. Three of the ground members in green are still in the back of one of two trucks. The scientists and detail in orange are standing behind them. The top third of the frame is filled with the bottom curve of the craft, so large that it only starts to curve at the edges of the frame. There are portable spotlight arrays set up strategically around the grass below the opening and cases of equipment on the ground and in the lift both. End description.]

▲▷▼◁▲

SHELL ANTEROOM INTERIOR SURFACE

**Document Number** : CIA-RPL97-▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊-26

**Collection** : SHELL

**Document Release Date** : 10.02.20▊▊

**File** :  [intsurface0114.png (86.2 KB)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/a8dd1eedf43c7d6fc134a1850df26930/tumblr_inline_qg5kzcOqsV1rqako5_1280.png)

Molecular analysis pending. Note: quality of photo degraded slightly due to shell proximity.

[Image description: A dark bluish grey surface, perhaps made of rock. It is very dim, but one can barely make out the lateral ridges of the surface, deep grooves that run in straight lines across the frame, though with varying heights to the ridges that make it seem organic. End description.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the format is based on the cia foia releases, with bonus redactions because, y'know, in-universe security clearances. the links on the pngs are real! you can also find them, along with every other image in this fic, [on tumblr here](https://lamphous.tumblr.com/arrival) (just ctrl+f the update number, ie 1.7). it's bizarrely hard to find good q stills from this movie but I try!


	10. 1.8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to set the mood: [a song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdZjJacozBc)
> 
> warnings: none really, but eddie's kind of dissociating or, at least, having an out of body experience in this one and is kind of all over the place

It's only a mile to the shell, ship, craft but it's a long one. Maybe it's because Eddie's dissociating the entire time. Maybe it's because the shell doesn't seem to change in size as they approach until, suddenly, they're only a few yards and it encompasses his entire field of vision. He's staring at it the entire time, but it's like the image of it, looming and strange, is imprinted in his eyes like the sun's corona and it isn't until he's blinked it away that he notices the difference between the first image and reality.

When their truck begins to slow and pull up under the craft, Eddie finally looks away, suddenly aware of how heavy his breathing is—or rather, not how heavy it is, because he's felt it curling back into his face the entire drive, but how it must sound to everyone else. He looks over but no one's seemed to notice or, if they have, they haven't deemed it more important than the sight before them. That's good. Right? Eddie hopes so.

"Every thirteen hours a door opens at the bottom," Commander Marsh is telling... someone. He can't tell who is who in the suits, only that Bill is across from him, his face illuminated by a tiny light in his helmet.

"In the same place?" Mike asks. The truck rumbles to a stop.

There's something in Bill's lap that Eddie didn't notice before. It's a cage with a bird in it—a canary, he sees when Bill notices his look and turns it. A fucking canary. Though Eddie holds in the hysterical laughter that wants to erupt from him, Bill still gives him a knowing shrug. It is what it is.

"Same place," Marsh confirms.

With a bulky clatter, they start climbing out of the back. It turns out Mike was next to him the entire time, as he's the one to help Eddie off the back of the truck. There's a hydraulic lift waiting for them the same color as their suits, which is oddly comforting, like they're, to some degree, supposed to be here. Like some part of this makes sense.

"...zero movement," someone says over the radio. "Alpha detail, clear to proceed, over."

Someone else replies and they're on the lift, and the lift is moving, and they're in the air, and Eddie can feel the proximity of the shell even as the darkness above says the same.

"Ten feet," someone says flatly. "Five."

And then someone else laughs. Eddie knows before he looks that it's Richie, even with the harsh quality of radio buzz running through it, not only because every one of Richie's laughs is burned into his memory but because who the fuck else could laugh right now?

Eddie turns his head away from the opening he can now sense, empty and cold. He knows there's a thin gust wind even though he can't feel anything through the suit, can see it rippling across the top of the others' heads, but he isn't looking anymore. Now he just sees Richie's face, shadowed oddly by his helmet light, as he reaches up towards the shell. The lift shudders to a halt just as his fingers make contact and his expression is wondrous and a little afraid. It's familiar and Eddie hates it, and Eddie loves it, and Eddie is... jealous, as always of Richie's stupid, nonchalant bravery.

With a brief burst of _fuck it_ , Eddie reaches up too. He only manages the tips of his fingers before the lift drives forward towards the door, but it's more than enough. It's cold and warm simultaneously, like hard rock sheltered from the sun but heated from within almost, like the hard shell of cooling magma without the give beneath it. Richie, of course, leans into it, and Eddie can almost feel the drag of plastic on rock. It's imaginary but tactile enough to distract him from the impending... something that awaits them inside and above.

"Suit telemetry strong despite unknown interference," someone says. Another adds oxygenation stats and something about "no known contaminants," things Eddie clings to as the sight of grass and sky is replaced by the material without a word. Eddie's breath is in his ears.

The lift pushes up into the entrance. Eddie thinks idly that there's no way it'll reach all the way to the white ceiling above, but he's less concerned with that than he is the flickering he catches out of the corner of his eye and quickly identifies as the screen in the arm of someone's suit flickering orientations like it can't decide which way is down.

Marsh's radio crackles on, even more oppressively loud in the hallway. It doesn't make sense—the sound is still contained in the same space of her helmet no matter where that helmet it—but it's true.

"Bill? Would you do the honors?"

One of the orange figures (there's a few too many of them on the lift to tell who's who in the dark like this) tears open a velcro compartment on one of the bags and pulls out a glowstick. It must be Bill, because it's carrying the bird. He cracks it into a dull yellow orange and shakes it for a moment before throwing it up into the air.

Only, it doesn't go _up_ .

It goes... over?

Thanks to its glow, they can all see as the stick rockets up like they would expect before floating, carried by some unseen current or maybe just the momentum of Bill's throw, until it clatters to the wall of the tunnel, skittering a few inches further before stilling. Somewhere in those few feet gravity shifts completely with no warning, no sense of any outside forces, just now the wall is a floor, and Eddie's mind shifts accordingly with no compunction. There is no negotiation over what to call it or how to process what he's seeing, no moment where he interprets it as the glowstick sticking to the wall before that refuses to make sense either—Bill throws the glowstick and it falls with no change in velocity to indicate anything magnetic or with a stronger pull than simple gravity, ergo it's just gravity, ergo that must be the floor. It wouldn't be the first crazy thing Eddie has believed and, judging by his present circumstance, it won't be the last.

The newer three stare in awe until Richie breaks the silence to mutter into his mic, "So that just happened."

Marsh seems to take this as her cue and punches the lift button again, bringing them up another couple of feet. When the lift stops again, Eddie feels himself drift an inch or so higher, the momentum carrying him up just enough that his feet leave the platform for a second.

"Ready?" Marsh asks, though she can't possibly be talking to Eddie because _how on Earth could he be ready for this_ — And maybe she wasn't asking anyone, as she simply climbs onto the railing of the lift and jumps without waiting for an answer, the simple motion carrying her up into the shell. She turns just enough in place to land feet first on the wall/floor (Eddie will find a better word later, when he's not focused on the great unknown ahead of them) and takes herself and her cases a few steps forward to make room.

The other tech joins her, then Bill, throwing back a polite grimace that's now illuminated by the light overhead before shrugging and leaping ahead with his equipment cases.

"Gravity nominal in the antechamber, over," someone says, but Eddie doesn't hear it, too busy staring up at the light. He can feel Richie and Mike behind him having some kind of conversation with their eyes but is focused on the way the white light swirling imperceptibly and catches in the ridges of the black rock. He doesn't know why "rock" is the word that comes to mind—there's something off about it, uncanny and, well, alien—that makes it just beyond the range of plausibly anything, but he has to call it something and it just makes sense.

"Dr. Kaspbrak."

It takes Eddie a second to realize the voice is coming from behind him, devoid of context as it is, but when he turns to see Mike he knows not just that Mike is the one who said his name but something else. Something more. "Dr. Hanlon."

"Together?"

And Mike, who Eddie has only known for hours and may be a little crazy, looks Eddie in the eye as he holds out his hand. He seems steady and curious, but Eddie sees a flicker of fear and uncertainty there that makes him trust Mike more than any blind confidence could. So Eddie takes his hand and jumps.


	11. 1.9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> VIDEO:  
> [what they saw](https://twitter.com/Iamphouse/status/1302069691691794432)

**PROJECT SHELL VIDEO TRANSCRIPTS** : SESSION 4

[ Interior of the Shell antechamber, a semi-rectangular room made of an alien material that looks like ridged rock. One of the walls is made of glass, separating the chamber from white mist. Opposite it is a tunnel that appears to have an extended hydraulic lift on its side, with grass beyond it. ]

[ Four figures in orange hazmat suits stand in the back of the main room with bulky plastic cases of equipment—five, once the one setting up the camera steps back enough to be seen. A sixth figure trips up the tunnel. ]

 **TOZIER** : Shit.

 **MARSH** : Hey Rich, you good?

[ The sixth figure throws up a thumbs up and pulls himself to his feet. ]

 **TOZIER** : Nothing bruised but my ego.

[ A second camera comes on, aimed at the glass wall from the back of the room. Two of the figures are standing before it (Kaspbrak, Hanlon) and Tozier joins them as the others (Marsh, Bowers, Denbrough) continue unpacking equipment. The wall is blank white. ]

 **DENBROUGH** : R-room's the same length. Laser ruler confirms 132 by 150 by 18 feet measurements of the last three sessions.

[ Another camera comes on, aimed at the bird in its cage. It hops once along its perch and its regular chirps continue throughout. ]

 **MARSH** : Good. Everything alright up there, boys?

 **HANLON** : Is it... a screen...?

[ The mist swirls. None of them move, though Tozier's head rears back instinctively. It grows darker, slipping from white to grey to a dull bluish color. ]

[ Denbrough moves towards the bird, which continues chirping. Over them, the sound of something moving, then air growing into almost a rasp. ]

[ Ambient light in the room wanes as the mist thickens. The sound of breathing from all six occupants is interrupted by a low, pulsing sound for four seconds followed by a single tone for two. It is organic but unrecognizable. ]

[ A shape appears in the mist, only discernible as the concentrated darkness of mist that moves in unison. It grows wider then splits off: two shapes. Kaspbrak takes half a step back. Two dark grey shapes grow clearer as they approach to show a large, featureless shape on seven spindly legs, almost like a hand, before coming to a stop before the glass. Another fluttering low tone fills the chamber. ]

 **MARSH** : Alright, Doctors. Who wants to start?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> video will be linked on the tumblr page in a mo. sorry about that, my computer totally freaked out and I had to go into the bios to fix the graphics driver lmao. two more left!


	12. 1.10

  
@ B. Marsh  
  


URIS Today at 06:47  
How's it going?

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:47  
good we're in airlock, bills unzipping them

* * *

URIS Today at 06:47  
I know, I can see you through the glass.  
Well, I can see _you_. It's crowded in there, huh?

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:48  
well here comes richie!!

* * *

URIS Today at 06:48  
Gotcha.  
What's Tozier's problem?

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:48  
nothing theyre just  
looking at each other  
eddie nodded  
oh ok  
yikes 😬🤢

* * *

URIS Today at 06:49  
Yep, that's Richie.  
Is he okay? His comm's off, I can't tell what he's saying.

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:49  
he says hes fine lol  
convenient trash can  
ok now eddies freaking out  
"nope, its all good, happens all the time. no extraterrestrial bullshit, i swear"

* * *

URIS Today at 06:50  
Well, that first part's true at least.  
He always says he has a "delicate system," though that's usually about hangovers.

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:50  
i like this one

* * *

URIS Today at 06:50  
Can't imagine why.

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:51  
ik i can already tell we're gonna be bffs

* * *

URIS Today at 06:51  
No, I mean I really can't.

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:51  
im sure he grows on u 😚

* * *

URIS Today at 06:51  
He hasn't yet with years of exposure, but I respect your optimism.

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:51  
ok so i wont point out how u of all people would never hang out w someone for decades if u didnt even  
tolerate them

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:53  
coming out now

* * *

URIS Today at 06:53  
Thanks, Beverly.

* * *

MARSH Today at 06:53  
im gay

* * *

URIS Today at 06:53  
Thanks, Beverly.

* * *


	13. 1.11

Tor.com | Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects. _Excerpts_

**Read a Chapter From G.W. Moore's SF Debut _The Antechamber_**

If you were worried that science fiction might never live up to reality after last year's close encounters, fear not. Excerpts from _The Antechamber_ , a new novel from Gollancz by unknown author G.W. Moore, have started circulating online and promise all the alien science, twisty questions of what it means to be human, and, yes, melodrama that fans of classic sf will love. Eagle-eyed readers have already pointed out the thinly-veiled similarities between the story and what happened around the globe that summer—the alien "pentapods" have five feet instead of seven—leading some to speculate that the author was part of a research team (although probably not a scientist, given the hand-wave-y nature of some of the science). Whether that's true or not (and we _will_ be investigating, don't you worry) there's plenty to love about what we've seen so far. Take a look here ahead of its September 29th release:

> I had met him earlier—hell, we had just met an alien together, that's not something you just forget—but something about this was different. Helping him out of his protective gear, our hands barely brushing as we went for the same zipper at the same time, eyes meeting through plastic. After we both climbed out of our suits I reached up to unbuckle his pack and when our hands touched for real the feeling jolted up my arms. His skin was so warm. Human. Earthly. And for a second I could've sworn he was reaching back.
> 
> I was still thinking about it hours later when we were all supposed to be in the mess for some much needed fuel. Instead I was sitting at my desk, writing down every observation I had in the room before they evaporated. I was trying to find the words for how the rock walls looked up close, tied to the image of Doctor Taylor's hand straining to touch the bottom of the ship as we drove up, but all I could think about were his eyes. Matt's eyes: soft brown and locked to mine. They felt like summer. [...]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized belatedly that people might miss this so just to reiterate: this post is from the future! I just don't want to give away when this ends bc I want to keep the will they/won't they save the world tension lol


	14. 1.12

While Richie continues alternating between dry heaving in a trash can and sipping the water one of the interchangeably anonymous people in white hands him, Eddie pops his helmet and skullcap off with shaking hands.

"Commander Marsh."

She looks up from her phone held carefully away from where more of the unnamed people in white are helping unclip her pack.

"Am I fired?" Eddie asks.

Marsh smirks. "You're better than the last guy."

Richie, hair wild and eyes wilder, scoffs from his spot on the floor scribbling in his stupid little notebook. Eddie has to agree. "That doesn't make me feel any better."

"How bad must the last guy have been?" Mike wonders aloud, though he quickly stops when Bill catches his eye and slowly shakes his head.

"Marsh—" Eddie tries again.

"Bev," she interrupts, scrubbing her fingers through her hair to unflatten it. "I think we're on a first name basis now. Friends who make first contact together, stay together."

"Bev," he repeats, and it's nice for a moment before he processes the rest of the sentence and the ringing in his ears starts. Like the worst game of word association, his mind jumps from "first contact" to physical contact, physical contact to hands, hands to those around him in their white gloves and white suits to hands in plastic, hands hanging off of gurneys, limp and yet twitching with the movement of being carried away, carried off, discarded, our brains aren't really wired for this, is Eddie's brain, is this is it, is he losing it?

He barely notices his breath quickening and hands shaking, caught up in the flow of unreality, of what is now reality with no escape. Dimly he recognizes the particular brand of lightheadedness that means a panic attack (or is that unreal too, was he wrong again?) but it isn't until he feels a hand on his that he realizes people outside him can see it too.

The hand belongs to Richie, who is leaning forward enough to be an accident and touching Eddie's hand enough to keep him from dropping the helmet he forgot he was holding. Eddie's first instinct is to see if the others have noticed, but something in the careful way Richie only glances at him occasionally tells him they haven't. Richie takes the helmet and sets it on the floor next to him before sitting upright, the crinkling of his suit briefly masking Eddie's still-rapid breaths.

"It's a shame we had to wear these things." Richie shakes the limp sleeve of the suit around him and the loudness of the sound brings Eddie back to metaphorical Earth, tactile and familiar. "What kind of first impression is that, right? I dressed up and everything yet they still made us wear uniforms. Where's the style? The pizzazz? That certain je ne sais quoi?"

With Richie unzipped and Eddie slowly coming down, he sees now that Richie's wearing one of his usual terrible t-shirts underneath, something with a stupid comic Eddie can't read from here. He's wearing over it a plain blue flannel that makes his eyes seem crazier. Eddie knows how it feels to wear that shirt and idly wonders, through the lingering numbness of panic, whether Richie picked it on purpose. He wonders if that would be a good or a bad thing.

"What, am I the only one here with any sense of style?" Richie continues, though it doesn't actually matter what he's saying or even if it's funny, just that it's noise. "That can't be right, but come on, guys, it's aliens. It's a big deal! I can't be the only one that thinks that."

"You're not," Mike says with a half-smile.

"Thank you!" Richie stands, almost knocking himself over as the suit hangs awkwardly half on him, half on the floor. Bill steps over to help him out of it, which is nice except that it puts him in Richie's crosshairs. "What about you, Big Bill? What's your story, morning glory?"

"'Big Bill'?" Bill repeats skeptically.

"Ironic. Cuz you're—" Richie pinches two fingers with one hand as the other continues tugging at the suit's hood caught on his pack.

"Okay." Bill yanks Richie's zipper down more roughly than necessary. "I joined afff-ter hearing about the Stargate Project in college."

"The... goats thing?"

He nods.

"Stargate ended in the nineties, though," Mike says, unclipping his own pack now that he's not distracted by Richie's possible mental breakdown or Eddie's actual one.

(Eddie, for what it's worth, has got his panic under control enough to sound normal and silently folds up his suit in the hopes that everyone will forget he's there.)

"Stargate did," Bill says meaningfully.

The two of them exchange eyebrow quirks as Richie yanks his legs free from the plastic. "Shit, they're still doing that?"

"I couldn't... say," Bill says with all the subtlety of a bad actor at a ren faire. "I work on a sort of inter-agency task force. L-lots of moving p-parts. We mostly investigate... complicated situations."

"Dude, that sounds so shady."

"It's not supposed to!" Holding Richie's helmet, Bill says mostly to the ground. "I joined because my brother, he— Well." He sets the helmet on a bench to the side. "He w-was part of one of the earlier projects, the ones that. Didn't go so well."

"So you joined the CIA because you wanted to... experiment on people?" Richie asks cautiously.

Bill physically recoils. "No, dude."

"Oh thank god."

"That's definitely how it seemed," Beverly adds from the corner where she's showing Eddie how to put away the suits, on her phone again.

"No no no," Bill shakes his head vehemently, almost dislodging his little wire framed glasses. "I w-w-wanted to find out whatever I could about what happened to Georgie. The only way I could do that was from the inside, and by then..." He shrugs. "I was high up enough it paid pretty well."

There's a long pause before Richie says, "Like Mulder?"

"Oh my god, _Mulder_ ," Eddie says. "That's who I was trying to think of."

"With like a bit of Alex Krycek in-too-deep, double agent vibes."

"Yes!" Eddie smacks his arm a couple times excitedly then flinches. He has no idea how the impulse got past his internal filter without a second thought, but Richie grinning at him might have something to do with it—or, more accurately, Richie silently noticing his panic and covering for him. One moment of weakness beget another.

It's then that a terse knock rattles the plexiglass window. Though it's not quite clear from the angle, Eddie can make out the shape of someone with curly hair. They look at Beverly, ignoring Richie's wave, and tip their head at the door they then walk away towards.

Richie's the first through the door regardless and the others join as Richie's still running his mouth. "Stan, Stan, Stan my man, can you believe that shit? Aliens!"

"Yeah, Richie, I know." Stan pushes his glasses up with one hand, the other patting Richie's shoulder blade. "Aliens."

Richie steps back, hands still on Stan's shoulders, to give him a skeptical look. "Come on, like you're not just as stoked as I am, Mister 'Knows the Production Number of Every Original Series _Star Trek_ Episode and at Least Three Fun Facts About It.'"

"Find me a Tribble and we'll talk." Stan smirks before turning to the rest of the now-assembled team. "Hi. Sorry we had to meet like this."

"What," Richie interjects, "with me, your best and oldest friend, hanging off you like a limpet?"

Stan finally shakes him off and steps back, fixing his hair where Richie has (inadvertently or not) mussed it in his hugging. Once he deems it acceptable, he tucks his glasses in his shirt pocket and holds out his hand. "Stanley Uris. CIA international liaison. No need to introduce yourselves, I already know. I picked you."

Something about it rings truer than it should, somewhere deep and wide. Eddie can't tell if it's the way Stan says it or something else but the sentence is much more than the sum of its parts, and not in the usual way. He's the last to shake Stan's hand by virtue of standing in the back of the group, but he could swear something accumulates as he goes around, like sliding feet along a carpet to gather static electricity before shocking the nearest person. Eddie gets the shock, but it doesn't feel bad. It's almost familiar, and when he meets Stan's eyes, he swears he feels it too.

"We go back in at 1900 hours," Stan says to them all, now from the middle of the room where they've unconsciously formed most of a circle around him. "I'll show you where you'll be working and sleeping, get you set up at your workstations, and then you can have lunch and rest—and no, Richie," Richie closes his mouth, "sleep is not optional."

"Not if you try hard enough," Richie mumbles, but in a way that says the joke is how he's saying it rather than what he's saying.

As they trickle out into the small hallway, Eddie doesn't miss that Richie is casually lingering so as to be last out with him. His first instinct is to feel pleased and excited, which somehow break through the heavy fog of the last hour like two narrow but bright sunbeams, but then he realizes what Richie's probably going to say and the walls go back up.

"Eds—" he manages to get out before Eddie shoves past him.

"Don't call me that."

"Eddie..."

"I have to get my phone from Bill, I—"

Richie steps in front of him and oh, Eddie hates him. That sun is gone, replaced by icy grey clouds, and Richie's attention isn't exhilarating so much as infuriating now when all Eddie wants is to go unseen about his personal insanity, unquestioned and alone.

"I was gonna ask if you're okay," Richie says right on schedule, with the smallest bite to it, "but now I can tell you're just being your normal bitchy self."

"Fuck you too, Richie." The familiar words fall out of his mouth with a sincerity that makes him sick, but he just can't, needs to do whatever he can to get out of this conversation before the urge to gut himself and hand Richie his heart comes back. "I can't do this with you."

For a second Richie's face falls not into sadness but something darker. Richie has a face that's made for laughing; he never looks more himself than when he's pulling faces like he pulls vowels in weird, taffy accents or when he's scrunched in on himself, laughing too hard at his own jokes to even open his eyes. Eddie never really thinks of him as an adult man—just Richie, a category of his own—but he does now when something shifts and makes him seem... squarer, realized differently. Like the shape of his body changes. Like it's that of a stranger.

"Look, man, pick a lane, alright?" Richie spits out the words like they taste too awful to hold on long enough to refine into a joke. "Either totally ice me out and pretend we're strangers or ignore everything that happened and act like we're just friends. I can't do the back and forth thing with you again, I've got enough to worry about without wondering if you're gonna tear my head off for making the same joke you laughed at a day ago."

"I can't do this with you," Eddie reiterates. "I have shit to do, and so do you, so—"

Richie scoffs, not laughs. "You're married to your job, I know." The smile on his face becomes less convincing with every word, warped like a parody of itself, almost mean. "Been there, done that, got the heartbreak."

"That's not—"

 _What I meant to say, what I meant to do, that's never been what I wanted you to think_ pile up in Eddie's throat. Some other part of him idly rubbernecks at the inner chaos and the external silence that follows, but the rest of him can't get a handle long enough to get the thoughts in order to find words for.

"Look, we can just. Be professional, right?" Richie says, Richie prods. "Isn't that what you're always telling me? It's not like we don't have anything more important to focus on."

The real Richie falls further away under the mask. Eddie wonders if he shouldn't feel glad, since it's the real Richie that's hurt and angry, but he isn't. He'd rather that than the sharp smiled automaton in front of him, but someone slips down the hallway between them and in those precious few seconds he can't see Richie's eyes he's gone, tucked away inside himself somewhere Eddie was never quite able to find.

"So we'll do that," he finishes. Then he laughs, just barely. "Yeah. We'll do that again. Good talk."

Though they're headed the same direction, it feels like Richie walks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and [a song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zGcdQHCGo0) to play us out
> 
> the lord (me) giveth (gay bev, promise of future bike night) and the lord (still me) taketh away (weird unsettled reddie angst)
> 
> to everyone who has user subs on for me and could not give less of a shit about the six emails you got today: sorry! thank you so much for hanging in there!
> 
> and to everyone else reading this: thank you also for hanging in there! hopefully next time my computer won't have a conniption in the middle of posting
> 
> next will be another interlude and then it'll be right back to plot. as you can probably tell I'm having a shit ton of fun writing this lol, I only hope it's half as fun to read! see you then

**Author's Note:**

> re: additional tags to be added/chose not to use warnings — I actually haven't decided how this is going to end yet, but I know how I'm getting there.
> 
> this fic would not be possible without the amazing work of several ao3 skin artists! I've made tiny tweaks here and there, but the email/log skin comes from La_Temperanza's "[How to Mimic Email Windows](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7953412)", the texts from CodenameCarrot and La_Temperanza's "[How to Make iOS Text Messages on AO3 ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434845/chapters/14729722)", and the interoffice memo type form from Heterochromia_Mars's "[Discord (Dark Theme) Work Skin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12142470)"
> 
> tumblr @[lamphous](https://lamphous.tumblr.com)  
> twitter @[Iamphouse](https://twitter.com/Iamphouse)


End file.
